If you would excel in this field, remember that a fundamental mistake is to strive to emulate the commercial horror novel or story. The bulk of this fiction is poorly written and itself imitative; you will risk learning your craft at the feet of mediocrity. And even if you choose the field’s most original voices to guide your efforts, the dangers of pastiche should be obvious.

If you admire Stephen King or Peter Straub or Dennis Etchison, fine; but save that admiration for party conversation. When it comes to committing words to paper, you are the writer, and it must be your ambition to better those you admire. If not, you are condemning yourself to be second-rate before you have even started.

Originality cannot be taught. But the task of finding your own voice will be eased if you stop reading what the marketplace calls horror fiction and join me in an important bit of heresy:

Horror is not a genre. It is an emotion.

It can be found in all of great literature, not simply that with lurid dust jackets. Read Conrad. Read Faulkner. Read Kozinski. Read Ballard, Cormier, Fuentes, McGuane, Stone, Whittemore. Read and read and read of the ways in which writers relate horrors without the strictures of genre.

Then return to your writing with a new perspective, unguided by the publishers who package their products for mass consumption with labels such as “horror.” Recognize that the fiction that we hold dearest, the fiction that you are seeking to write, is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special bookstore shelf like science fiction or the western.

It is any and all kinds of fiction.